I feel that Yaml sucks. I understand the need for such markup language but I think it sucks. Somehow it’s clunky to use. Can you explain why?

  • Windex007@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Any language in which whitespace has syntactic value is intrinsically flawed.

    Can’t speak to your specific issues, but that’s why yaml will always suck.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Haskell supports both semantic whitespace and explicit delimiters, and somehow almost everybody that uses the language disagrees with you.

      But anyway, for all the problems of YAML, this one isn’t even relevant enough to point out. Even if you agree it’s a problem. (And I agree that the YAML semantic whitespace is horrible.) If YAML was a much better language, it would be worth arguing whether semantic whitespace breaks it or not.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      YAML sucks because, among other things, indenting it is not obvious.

      In contrast, the only mistake of Python when it comes to whitespaces was allowing hard tabs, which makes it too easy to mix them if your editor is not configured.

      Improper indentation stands out more than missing or unbalanced braces and it’s really not an issue to delimit code blocks.

      • ugo@feddit.it
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        12 days ago

        Hard tabs are the only accessible option though. If you care about developers with a different vision capability than yours, the only correct indentation choice is tabs.

        If, because of bad vision, someone needs to crank the font size way up, it’s very possible that they might need to work with a tabstop of 3, 2, or even just 1 space.

        With tabs, this is user configurable. With spaces it isn’t.

          • ugo@feddit.it
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            10 days ago

            What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.

            I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)

    • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org
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      12 days ago

      Not any language. I code professionally in F# which has semantic whitespace and it has literally never been an issue for me or my team. In contrast to Python, it’s a compiled language and the compiler is quite strict, so that probably helps.

    • Nighed@sffa.community
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      12 days ago

      It’s the only time that tabs Vs spaces really riles me up. So annoying when everyone has different tab lengths